There is always more work than time. With a fixed amount of time and an ever-expanding scope of work, it’s your job as a leader to prioritize what you work on, but how? 

Reflect on your company priorities

A great leader creates alignment within the team and across the organization. If you’re a team manager, you’re expected to align the team to ensure they’re working as a high-performing team, pulling together in the same direction. At the same time, you should also make sure that your team is working towards goals and initiatives that are important to the company, but do you know what they are? 

To keep abreast of current company priorities, you must understand the company's current state. If your organization uses objectives and key results (OKRs), locate the top-level objectives and check if your work aligns with one of them. Ask your executive team for the company’s overarching business strategy. Find someone to walk you through the product strategy. Search for the tech department’s technical strategy. Once you understand the broader company, product, or department priorities, identify goals that are more directly connected to them.

For example, if your company has an overarching vision to move from hosted infrastructure to cloud, ask yourself if your team is prioritizing work that takes visible steps towards this overarching vision. If not, you should at least prioritize some thinking or discussion time with the team to decide on a concrete plan for how you will contribute to this overarching goal. 

One challenge with looking for business, product, or technical strategies and priorities is that they may not exist, or if they do, they remain undocumented. But this void creates an opportunity to demonstrate leadership; You can be the catalyst to create, refine, and document them.

Ask yourself, “What is truly important?”

If you’ve ever studied time-management approaches, you’ll, at some point, come across the Eisenhower Matrix. This thinking model challenges you to think about what is truly important. It’s easy for a leader to be busy and work on small incoming requests, but when you step back, you might realize you’re not really working on the most important things.

To reflect on what is truly important, ensure you have some time blocked out in your calendar to reflect. This could be as simple as 10 minutes at the start of each day. Or at least 30 minutes at the end of a week. Ask yourself, “What are all the things that I could spend time on, and what items bring the most value?” While this question is subjective, asking it regularly allows you to relatively compare the value of all the activities you could work on. 

For example, one week, you might say, “It’s more important we complete this vendor assessment this week because of an upcoming contract renewal than work on solving some flaky automated tests because we can do that next week.” Relative prioritization is much easier than absolute prioritization, as priorities change over time. Something that isn’t important this week might be really important next week because of a hard deadline.

Prioritize over three horizons

It’s always easy to focus on the near-term things, such as clearing a dependency for another team or staying on top of a weekly activity. Keeping busy feels great, but can prevent us from achieving bigger or more complex goals. A helpful way to approach time is by dividing your time over three horizons: now, next, and later. 

To apply this approach, define what “now, next, later” means in your context. “Now” might be this week, “next” this month, and “later” in the next six months. Each week, aim to make progress on one goal from each of these timeframes. 

For example, if you have a goal of running an offsite in a month’s time, this week’s activity might be to decide on a list of participants and send a calendar blocker. An action like this gives people notice to clear their calendars and increases the likelihood of everyone taking part. 

You may have another goal set to move off an unreliable email-sending provider in six months. One action might consist of arranging a meeting with key stakeholders to determine the impact of swapping email vendors. This action allows you to work out any assumptions, risks, and scope of work to decide if six months is viable or not.

Using this three-horizons approach ensures you don’t always prioritize the short-term at the expense of the mid- or long-term goals.

Prioritize with high return on investment

The term “quick wins” implies a high return on investment. To determine what a quick win is, roughly estimate the time you might need to complete a task and the relative value or impact. Once you’ve estimated the effort and value, focus on the high-value, low-effort tasks. These are your quick wins. Completing quick wins also gives a sense of progress, a point to celebrate, and you can redirect that momentum to the next set of tasks - typically the higher effort and higher value items that need breadking down into smaller steps.

Thinking in terms of return on time invested allows you to maximize your impact given a limited amount of time. Avoid timewasters (those high-effort/low-impact tasks) and only do the fill-ins (e.g., low-effort/low-impact) tasks if you have the time. 

Final thoughts

Prioritization is a leadership task that you need to do on a daily or at least weekly basis. Don’t expect others to prioritize work for you because others will have competing goals, incentives, or structures. 

Increase your impact by learning to prioritize your work. Ensure your priorities align with company/product or tech strategies. Ask yourself, “What is truly important?” Make progress towards mid- and long-term goals by prioritizing your work over three horizons and constantly challenging yourself to reflect on the return on investment to maximize your impact.